Sunday, January 24, 2016

A few years ago all hell broke loose when a group of Mummers, all Caucasian men, wore Native American headdresses. At that time I wrote, “Sometimes it’s fun to worry about inconsequential minutiae, but the fact is Native headdresses have been part of the Mummers for decades. Since the Mummers are about feathers, it should come as no surprise that some brigades would opt to use a Native headdress as part of its ensemble.”

While I don’t wish to revisit that instance in this column, I will visit this year’s Mummers controversy — the uproar surrounding the parade’s parody of Caitlyn Jenner and the ‘high crime’ of stereotyping Mexicans with brownface and other people supposed to be Mexicans dressed as dancing tacos.

There are good jokes and there are bad jokes. There are also lethal jokes that shake up nerves and sensitivities. Take Sarah Silverman, a political comedienne who in one comedy act claims that if Jesus came back from the dead, she would gladly crucify him all over again. She takes to the extreme Jonathan Swift’s maxim that “nothing is above satire,” be it abortion, religion or sex. Silverman is wise enough, however, not to say anything untoward about Mohammad because there may be unsettling consequences to that. Sometimes self interest transcends the desire to get standing ovations. I do not like Silverman, but I would never impose on another person’s cup of tea (gagging Silverman) if they happened to be a fan.

Why do I bring up Silverman? I suppose it is because the comics division of the Mummers Parade see themselves as part of this great American tradition of scandalous satire. Here’s what the very Catholic (and conservative) author G. K. Chesterton said about satire: “A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.” The satire we see in the Mummers Parade is not the smart, refined satire of “Gulliver’s Travels,” but satire of the most rustic sort: bargain basement parody.

Uproar over the skits performed at this year’s parade did not come from die-hard Mummers fans lining Broad Street; they came from a few City Hall power brokers, the new mayor, a couple of suits and ties who makes their living behind desks and the new Executive Director of LGBT Affairs, Nellie Fitzpatrick. They believe they have a job to do and that is to keep our city out of the business of showing disrespect.

Here’s part of what Mayor Kenney said about this year’s parade: “It’s all about education and it’s all about explaining to people who might not understand that sometimes you do things that are offensive to people, whether you meant to or whether you didn’t, you still offended them.”

Every single one of us is guilty of offending people whether we mean to or not. When a man who is walking ahead of me on a sidewalk suddenly clears his throat and spits a huge glob of mucus right in front of me, I might be offended. When the well-dressed elderly woman hears a risqué joke on a city bus, she may be offended. The people waiting for the morning rush hour El at Front and Girard may be offended if they have to watch a couple engage in lusty, inappropriate public affection. You might be offended when you have to witness the antics of a two year-old child ducking under the banquet tables at an adult holiday party because the kid’s father was too lazy to hire a babysitter. We are offended everyday by offenses great and small.

The 2016 “offensive” Mummers skits, for the most part, was typical Mummery. Mummers comics, generally, are not Union League members or Harvard grads, but raw Philly-types who drink beer, have strong opinions and cuss. The comics have always been especially outrageous, so much so that a Mummers observer from 1978 wouldn’t have noticed anything peculiar about the 2016 skits.

If anything, the parade is a shadow of what it used to be. The new, sanitized, “Disney” Mummers Parade is just a little more exciting than watching a 4th of July parade in a small town in Utah. In fact, compared to what the parade was like in the 1970s, it has become a practice run for performances before TV cameras and for those special shows in the Convention Center. In prior years, the parade usually lasted until midnight. There was an exhilarating feeling on Broad Street then, an actual atmosphere of joyful revelry and personal involvement as people on the street camped out or huddled curbside, staying late into the night or until the last Mummers marched on past.

As for the Sammar Strutters who adopted a Mexican theme and performed in brownface, Mummers comics have been dressing up as wenches, colonialists, British soldiers, Frenchmen in white powder puff wigs, nuns, Arabs, Turkish sultans, Hawaiian princesses, former presidents and cops for decades. It’s all about dressing up and getting attention, not about nuance in comedy A Mummers comic routine will not have the subtle humor of a 19th century drawing room. This is the raw belly laughter of a working class city.

When the Finnegan New Year’s Brigade preformed their Jenner skit with the Wheaties and the Fruit Loops boxes they were indulging in typical working class Mummers rough comedy. If anything, use of the Fruit Loops box was out of sync because Jenner has never been gay. (The word ‘fruit’ has been used as a gay insult for ages, so the Mummers got it wrong). Bisexuality was not part of Jenner’s life as Bruce. When an interviewer asked Catilyn after her transition if she was now officially a lesbian because she still has a sexual interest in women, she refused to answer the question.

Now we have a mayor who wants to give catechism lessons or sensitivity lessons to Mummers comics. He wants to organize them into classrooms and elevate their minds so that they won’t do things like make fun of Caitlyn Jenner. Mayor Kenney wants the comics to learn that there are some subjects that their comedy routines cannot touch.

The skit was not, as the Executive Director of LGBT Affairs, Nellie Fitzpatrick said, “Transphobic and disgusting.” I believe that’s going way too far.

While some calm discussion needs to ensue regarding the Mummers use of brownface, our new mayor should not be so much of a Pooh Bear tool for the agenda of a few ideologues in City Hall.

The different arts
communities in Philadelphia---theater,
painting, poetry and literature—are like individual fish bowls arranged along
the top of a wall. Each community is its own enclave or kingdom. Actors hang with other actors; visual artists
keep company with other visual artists, and poets and writers generally keep to
their own circles unless they have to jump bowls and write about actors or the
visual artists. This arrangement is confining, parochial, and limiting. It’s
also a Philadelphia thing because, at
least according to a poet friend of mine, the various arts communities in New
York behave in a different fashion: they mix and
mingle freely with one another.

Perhaps
we should ask: what is art? I pose this question because many people today
believe that art can be anything you want it to be. A fashion model, for
instance, will refer to her walk down the runway or her pose before a magazine
photographer as “art.” Actors call their work in the theater “art” although
there was a time not too long ago when talented actors used to be referred to
as good technicians capable of memorizing
lines. While this may or may not be true, expressing yourself emotionally
on stage is a talent that many do not possess. One thing most people will agree
on is this: actors are the most visible
of all the arts communities. They are really the talking heads of the arts
world, comparable to “talking head” (broadcast) journalists.

Consider the poor painter who does not get to
appear on stage night after night to standing ovations or mild applause. The
painter’s face is not plastered on billboards along Broad
Street. A painter works in isolation, has an
opening show at a gallery where he or she meets the public, then after that it’s
all about returning to work (in isolation).

Art in
our time has come to mean anything, from the way colorful tattoos blend into
human epidermis to fancy food production in hot urban kitchens where The Chef is almost certainly…an artist.
Chefs started to become “artists” sometime in the mid-1990s but the sad fact
is, ‘art’ is the most abused word in the English language.

The abuse of the word ‘art’ may
start in progressive schools where children are taught that “everybody is an
artist,” meaning, of course, that anybody can be trained to be an artist. In such
schools any sort of hierarchy of talent is seen as elitist. This is why I wince
when I hear dilettantes say things like, “I’m going home to make art.” You
are—really? How do you know that what you are about to make will become art? But that’s not the point, really. The point
is that because the maker declares that what he/she makes is art then it is
art. It becomes art because I say it is
art. End of discussion.

The dribble down effect of this
kind of thinking has changed the work presented in many of the city’s art
galleries.

The modern art in these galleries
is not only overpriced, it is incomprehensible and just plain bad, leading many
people to conclude that much of modern art is a fraud. At one CenterCity gallery opening recently, I
went to check out the work of two modern artists. I watched as one of the artists entered the
gallery with her small entourage. Dressed to the nines in a pair of patent
leather New York stilettos, the
artist surveyed her “art” which was displayed in the front of the gallery
closest to the door. Her paintings were a mesh of pastel colored brush strokes
evoking Victoria’s Secret lingerie
or long squiggly lines rising upwards like swimming spermatozoa, priced around
$8,000 a piece. As the evening wore on, and it became obvious that nobody was
buying (or would buy) any of her work, she left the gallery in a huff. This was
long before the reception was over. The squiggly spermatozoa would now have to
swim downward and be packed up and sent back to her New
York sperm bank.

I’ve witnessed similar scenarios at other
galleries. One OldCity
gallery, for instance, seems to specialize in the work of young, hot “girl”
artists. At opening receptions at this gallery one can see the artists lined up
like Playboy escort bunnies, all of them in heavy makeup and heels and of
course killer ringlet hair cascading down their shoulders and framing exposed
cleavage. Every time I go to this gallery I think I’m attending another chic
Nicole Cashman party.

I may be stereotyping, but when I
imagine women artists I immediately think of peasant head kerchiefs, big
bracelets, flannel shirts, or dangling Georgia O’Keefe earrings. The glamorous Hollywood
celebrity look is new and raises the question: Are these women really the bored wives of
wealthy hedge fund husbands, as somebody in the art world once suggested? This
hedge fund art really has no distinction yet what comes to mind is the
(wallpaper patterned) “art” that real estate agents plaster on the walls of
rehabbed homes and offices before they hold an open house.

“In art,” as Picasso once wrote,
“the less people understood me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself
with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques,
I became famous, and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales….
But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as
an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term….I am only a public
entertainer who has understood his times…”

What an admission! And yet the narcissism
of our times gives untoward courage to scores of anonymous Picasso wannabes who
have no trouble calling themselves artists.

All of which leads me to the philistine
question: Can there ever be too much art?

There is so
much new art in the world now there could never be a museum large enough to
contain it all. How can we save all of this stuff? How do we catalogue it? Art
is being produced everyday, every hour and at amazing speeds. And it is coming straight at us from every
strata of society, even the sidewalks of CenterCity where one can see street artists
sitting curbside with their exhibitions lined up along Chestnut or Walnut
Street. “Art for Sale,”
their signs say. At $5 a piece the
pieces are relatively cheap. Buy now, because you never know when the maker of
these street absurdities and puzzles may hit the Picasso jackpot. (Yes, it’s
better than playing the slot machines at Sugar House).

So, yes, art is
everywhere, even in hair salon shops where the owner/manager displays his art,
beautifully framed because of the expensive prices of his cuts. Or: go into a doctor’s office and see the doctor’s
new hobby. It’s drawing or painting and he’s turned the walls of his waiting
room into a small gallery. He’s an artist and—surprise! -- His pieces are
beautifully framed because of his high patient prices.

There’s flea
market art; there’s also the grassroots art of the city’s many small artistic
clubs like The Sketch Club and the Plastic Club, where members have monthly exhibits.
These exhibits have a dual purpose; they present the work of new or lesser
known artists, and they serve as ad hoc community centers because these
gatherings are also parties with food, wine, and sweets. Art parties are always
a good thing, even if they attract more non-artists than artists and bring in the
city’s whacko reception addicts who track down all the free food and drink
events in the city with the determination of a house detective.

As for
who is really an artist, I’ll defer to Scott Berkun, who said, “An Artist will risk
many things, wealth, convenience, popularity, fame or even friends and family
to protect the integrity of their ideas. If you’re not risking anything, and
mostly doing what you are told, you’re probably not an artist. “

Sunday, January 10, 2016

A Philadelphia Inquirer article chronicling the demise of
art galleries in the city got us thinking. (1) Philadelphia
is not New York. (2) Most of the
population here is lowbrow. (3) Much of what passes for modern art stretches
credibility. Are galleries closing because, as some have suggested, people are
finally discovering that much of modern art is a fraud? At one opening recently
we attempted to discern the “there there” of the work of a stiletto wearing New
York-based artist in town to promote her abstracts. In some CenterCity galleries this is what the art
world has become: bored wealthy Sunday lounger types taking up the brush as
their Hedge Fund husbands foot the bill for a dilettante lifestyle. What do
these “artists” produce? Intricate floral shower curtain designs; pink line
graphics hinting at Victoria’s
Secret underwear or splashy decorative pieces reminiscent of the “art” that real
estate agents love to hang on rehabbed condo walls. The price tag for these
gems is the cost of a week’s trip to Paris:
$8,000 and up. Oh yes, the New York
artist’s pieces did not sell. She left the opening early—and in a huff.

Magadalena Elias’
Everything is Illuminated exhibit at the 3rd
Street Gallery on 45 N. 2nd
Street got us thinking of the old gobelins
tapestries that used to hang outside government buildings in France
in the 1600s. Gobelins were hung from hooks as banner art when a dignitary was
in town, and sometimes they were used to warm the walls of a room. Elias began
weaving gobelins after the death of her good friend, Karen Lenz, but
gobelin-making has been in her genes since childhood, inspired mostly by her
grandfather. “In my
mind’s eye I could visualize him sitting in his favorite chair, working on
something he called gobelin. As he worked, his peacefulness radiated
outward and I wanted to share in that peacefulness, so I began work on my first
piece, “The Inversion of Don Quixote.” Unlike that Hedge fund artist in stilettos,
Elias sold three pieces in an hour but not at $8,000 a piece.

A taste for Sherlock
Holmes mysteries is like a taste for liver and onions-- you either have it or
you don’t. Add slapstick to the mix (The Three Stooges and all those pies
thrown at high society dinners) and you have a comic book. The rocket-paced methamphetamine
rush of Ken Ludwig’s Baskervulle, A
Sherlock Holmes Mystery at the SuzanneRobertsTheatre,
had us wishing we were watching Eugene O’Neill, Tom Stoppard or Tennessee
Williams. A million costume changes, men with twirling mustaches, flowers that
fall from the sky and land stem first in the ground, or sound effects that
recall Grofe’s The Grand Canyon Suite,
cannot replace a substantive narrative. While pro-slapstick fans and assorted
kiddies in the audience loved the Ludwig carnival, there was no standing
ovation. The real Holmes mystery that night
however was the dangerously downsized post show reception that has us worried
about the financial health of one of our favorite theaters.

Michael Nutter’s cat fight with Donald Trump originated with
his wish to ban Trump from Philadelphia.
But banning people (and books) because of the ideas they represent only produces
underdog heroes. (Philadelphia’s FriendsCentralSchool,
a venerable Quaker institution, has already banned Mark Twain’s Huckleberry
Finn because of inappropriate language). Some say the ex-mayor had to go out
with a bang, and Trump was an all too- easy target. We wonder how a Trump ban
would operate. Would it include spending millions to set up barriers along the
Parkway? How about armed guards, Jerusalem
style, along Broad Street? Modern cities are not medieval fortresses with
walls, so if Trump wanted to break Nutter’s ban he’d have to disguise himself
as a SanctuaryCity
illegal immigrant. Then he’d be welcomed with open arms.

Andy Kahan’s author lecture series at the Free Library has
brought celebrity writers to the city with Oprah Winfrey-style pizzazz. But locally-based
authors who want to jump on Kahan’s Central Library bandwagon with their new
books have to swear off all other lecture circuit venues for the duration of
their publicity tours. Central’s demand for promotion monogamy-- one book = one
venue-- is an ingenuous way to help keep “local” authors permanently local and under the radar.

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About Me

I am a Philadelphia-based author/journalist, the author of nine published books, including: The Cliffs of Aries (1988), Two Novellas: Walking Water & After All This (1989), The Boy on the Bicycle (1991-1994), Manayunk (1997), Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia (2000), Tropic of Libra (2002), Out in History and Philadelphia Architecture (2005)and SPORE (2010). In 1990, Two Novellas was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a Hugo Award. Winner of the 2005 Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Two Novellas rewritten and retitled for Starbooks Press: Walking on Water & After All This, available as an e-book. Winner of the Philadelphia AIA 2005 Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. I am currently the City Beat editor at ICON Magazine, a contributing editor/writer at The Weekly Press, and a weekly columnist (The Local Lens) for Philadelphia’s SPIRIT Community Newspapers. I am the Religion Editor for the Lambda Book Report, and have written for Philadelphia's Broad Street Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News.
www.tnickels.net